Weather Tools

Here you will find a list of helpful weather-related links for planning your next hunt. We will always do our best to provide links to information that is free unless we truly believe it is worth your hard-earned cash.

Satsquatch is a beautiful mobile satellite viewer that is currently being developed by a friend of mine. It is in my opinion the best satellite website you will find anywhere. Many of the features require a paid account but you can view the “Red Band Visible” channel for free and it looks amazing.

This is one of the best sites you can possibly visit for real-time observations. Just about any type of meteorological observation you can think of is housed on this site. It will take a bit of exploring to find everything you want to look at, but I think you will find it very useful.

On the NWS page you will also find what is called a “meteogram,” which is what is pictured above. This is a nice graphical way of seeing how conditions will change at your location over the next few days. The link provided will take you to a meteogram for Madison, WI. To find a meteogram for your location, go back to the NWS home page (weather.gov) and type in your home town. When the forecast for your town comes up, scroll down and there will be an image like the one above that says “Hourly Weather Forecast.” Click this and it will take you to the latest meteogram.

Historical Weather Data

Many hunters often want to see historical data to get an idea of what weather conditions were like during the best deer movement or to match weather conditions with trail camera photos. While this is not currently something we plan to host on HTF, provided below are links to a few websites that we believe are the best sources this information.

This page will allow you to select data for any location in several different formats including PDF, .csv, and plain text. It will tell you that the data has been “added to your cart” but it will not cost you anything. You will get an email shortly after your order is processed that contains the data you requested.

Here is an example of a PDF version of this data from Dane County Wisconsin in the first two weeks of November 2016:

The Iowa Mesonet website provides a data archive for several different meteorological products. Many of them are specific to Iowa but there are others for weather stations around the world. The main one of these is going to be the “ASOS Download link” where you will be able to pull data from most airports around the world that have an ASOS station. However, there are a few other useful data archives here as well.

I don’t personally use Wunderground simply because I get most of the information they provide from more direct sources such as the pages above. However, many people like it for its simplicity and historical weather data.